If anyone thought that the gun regulation debate in the United States would ever be the same after the Parkland, Florida shootings in February and the subsequent student crusade to force action from legislators to stop the violence, today’s statement from Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo should change their minds.

Chief Acevedo appeared on CBS’s Face The Nation this morning to address the latest in the record number of school shootings this year, the Santa Fe High School massacre and his comments indicated a drastic change in outlook from the typical Second Amendment-brandishing reputation of Texas government officials.

“People at the state level and the federal level in too many places in our country are not doing anything other than offering prayers,” Acevedo told Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan.

“We need to start using the ballot box and ballot initiatives to take the matters out of the hands of people that are doing nothing that are elected into the hands of the people to see that the will of the people in this country is actually carried out,” he continued.

With the Chief of Police in the largest city in Texas calling for a citizens’ political revolt in the land of the NRA, you know that the landscape is shifting under the feet of the politicians who have thrown their lot with the gun manufacturing lobby that finances their campaigns rather than listen to the pleas of parents desperate to protect their vulnerable children from a country filled with assault weapons and people cruel enough to turn them upon others.

Chief Acevedo’s comments on Face the Nation come after he posted a remarkably frank and rawly emotional post on Facebook expressing his frustrations with having to listen to NRA apologists while dealing with the real-life consequences of a flawed system (or, more accurately in the case of Texas, the lack of a system) of gun regulation that left ten people dead in Santa Fe.

One would hope that the call for action on gun regulation from the head of law enforcement in Texas’ largest city would be met with the respect and dignity it deserves in the wake of the slaughter in Santa Fe, and surprisingly the comments left on Acevedo’s Facebook post were overwhelmingly supportive.

However, despite the fact that more people have been killed in school shootings this year than in all of the multitude of military actions that our nation is currently engaged in around the world, there are still plenty of people in Texas and the rest of the U.S. who believe that their right to play with guns outweighs the safety and security of the rest of the populace who overwhelmingly support sensible gun regulations like a ban on assault weapons, high capacity magazines, and bump stocks and closing background check loopholes.

With Republican politicians in the pocket of the Russia-funded NRA, don’t expect much to change until every candidate with any rating from the NRA other than an “F” is voted out of office in the midterms. As Chief Acevedo advocates, it’s time to use the ballot box to see that the will of the people in this country is actually carried out.

Register. Vote. Nothing will be fixed until you act to remove the NRA stooges from office.

You can watch an excerpt of Chief Acevedo’s Face the Nation interview in the video clip below.

"We've got to make sure that everyone stores [guns] in a responsible manner, and that there are significant penalties when they fail to do so and people die as a result"